Studies of Expansive Learning

This chapter discusses a series of studies of expansive learning in formal school settings. The theory of expansive learning puts the primacy on communities as learners, on transformation and creation of culture, on horizontal movement and hybridization, and on the formation of theoretical concepts. It builds on foundational ideas put forward by four key figures in Russian cultural-historical school: Lev Vygotsky, Aleksei Nikolajevitch Leont'ev, Evald Il'enkov, and Vasily Davydov. In a study of expansive learning among the teachers of a Finnish middle school, the central learning challenge was of moral-ideological nature: to move beyond a negative and cynical image of the students and to discover positive potential in them. The theory of expansive learning currently expands its analysis both up and down, outward and inward. Moving up and outward, it tackles learning in fields or networks of interconnected activity systems with their partially shared and often contested objects.